The judge hearing a case challenging the Bush administration's
warrantless wiretapping program said Wednesday that the plaintiffs may keep
documents AT&T says contain proprietary information for use in preparing
their case, but the documents must remain under seal.

The lawsuit has been brought against the telecommunications
giant by Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that advocates
for privacy. The organization says AT&T (Research) gave phone and e-mail
records to the National Security Agency without warrants, violating federal
law.

EFF in its case will be allowed to use the sealed
documents, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said, among them a declaration
from retired AT&T technician Mark Klein and several internal AT&T
documents. Additionally, the judge instructed AT&T to work with EFF
to find limited redactions that would allow some public disclosure.

"Our view is there is an ongoing massive violation
of the law," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohen in court. "There's
a massive flow of information about millions of phone calls."

AT&T had argued that the information contained
in the documents was proprietary information, the intellectual property
rights of the company, and it wanted the documents returned.

Walker also set a June 23 date to hear arguments from
AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice to dismiss the case on grounds
of national security.

"This is all about the president's ability to
protect national security," said Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Carl Nichols, arguing that the president's power under the War Powers Act
"trumps a private citizens right to have his or her day in court."

"It's not as if this is a new thing," he
said. "The government does this from time to time."

Nichols also offered to provide the judge with classified
documents supporting his argument.

The lawsuit stems from the administration's domestic
surveillance program, which bypasses the courts to listen in to some of
the international phone calls of those suspected of having terrorist connections.

The administration says the program is necessary and
lawful under the power Congress granted to the president when it authorized
him to wage war in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the then-ruling Taliban
who sheltered them.

The program was publicly disclosed in December.

Another lawsuit was filed in New York last week after
USA Today published allegations of a separate program in which AT&T,
BellSouth and Verizon provided the NSA with records of the billions of domestic
phone calls.

The newspaper reported NSA doesn't record or listen
to those conversations. Instead, it said, the agency uses the data, which
includes numbers, times and locations, to look for patterns that might suggest
terrorist activity.

That class action lawsuit, originally filed against
Verizon, has been expanded to include the other two telecommunications companies.
BellSouth and Verizon have denied cooperating with the NSA; AT&T has
said it would not do so without proper legal authorization. The administration
has also neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the second program.